YOU THINK WE HAVE IT BAD TODAY?

There's a lot of complaining going around these days, everything from politics to the economy. But when it comes to crime, like the rest, it's business as usual. This page from MAN'S LIFE (May 1969) shows the same things going on back then as they are now. Life goes on, brah.

DRACULA'S LAVENDER LADIES

Unlike the contemporary journalists of yesteryear, film critics of today have the unique luxury of a retrospective viewpoint of classic films from the past to enrich their commentaries. Too often, though, these films are assessed through the lens of presentism and there seems to be a compulsion to judge things in the context of current societal and moral values, which we all know were most certainly not the same back then. Still, some cinema historians find the need to wipe clean the perceived verdigris of the irrelevant "old ways" with the new, which, in my opinion, is not only a critical error, but irresponsible and highly specious. In many ways, it reminds me of the so-called book bans of the last few years.

To put things in context, we are currently being led by the nose by billionaire tech giants, politicians, scientists, and federal and local lawmakers into an uncertain--and perhaps apocalyptic--future. Perplexing changes are made regularly; for instance, prostitution is still illegal in most of the United States, but up until only recently, sex reassignment programs and gender-affirming care were often funded by the federal government. Moreover, news media bias continues unabated on both sides of the fence and objective journalism is slowly going by way of the Dodo. And lest we forget the elephant in the room: the AI gods and their legions of worshippers, along with the data centers that support them by using yet another way to suck the life-force out of the environment.

In the meantime, literature is being usurped and re-written to satisfy presentist thinking and the arts are indiscriminately being re-fashioned into a new aesthetic. Meanwhile, social media and its influencers are shaping public opinion on what to buy, what to wear, what to eat, and more dangerously, what to think.

This brings us to the literary microcosm of cinema history in general and horror cinema history in particular, where it has been an increasingly common practice for authors to apply their own stamp of revisionism on their work from the subtlest to the most brazen of ways. The good news is that research material is more widely available today than ever before and new facts about horror films, the actors and the crews that made them are being unearthed on a regular basis. It's how the writer appropriates this information and how he or she manipulates it that makes the difference.

Granted, it's nearly impossible to remain 100% objective in this field and the topic itself inherently invites the use of metaphor and speculation when under the lens of criticism. There is nothing wrong with metaphor and speculation, especially in the case of the latter when information is insufficient to fully resolve a point. But there comes a time when, 1) The metaphor becomes an exaggerated stretch of the author's imagination, and 2) Speculation is asserted without any correlation to existing facts, that these devices are wielded carelessly, albeit deliberately, to form an opinion that is not always objective.

Now, on to the reason why I brought this topic up today: recently I was researching some information on Universal's DRACULA (1931) and found myself leafing through the section on the film in Jonathan Rigby's informative book "American Gothic: Six Decades of Classic Horror Cinema" (Signum Books, 2017). Imagine my surprise when I came across this passage:

The Eliza Doolittle type whom Dracula takes as his first London victim is dropped altogether, while the English women sharing Renfield's coach journey are more strongly identified [italics mine] as bluestockings -- which, to judge from the footage here, may have been a 1930s euphemism for lesbians.

After reading this, I was ready to pull what's left of my hair out by the roots and I remain quite dumbfounded on the assertion that Rigby resorted to in this comparison between the two women (Carla Laemmle and Daisy Belmore in the English version) and to how onion-skin thin--and unfounded--I believe this assumption to be. To make Rigby's statement clear: he was at that point discussing the Spanish version, but he implies with the words "more strongly" that his same observation applies to the English version as well.

I can't tell you how ridiculous this sounds to me, and I'll tell you why.

After watching both opening coach sequences, I can't see anything remotely indicating the two women in either scenes can be interpreted as lesbians. In addition, Rigby's term "bluestockings" is misleading. Unless there is some colloquial meaning behind it, bluestockings is a term historically used to describe women who were educated and preferred intellectual pursuits over the typical household duties expected of them. True, they were outliers of traditional society, but that didn't make them all lesbians. There was actually a Blue Stockings Society active in England in the 18th century, which antedates Stoker's "Dracula" by a hundred years. Moreover, bluestockings were looked upon in "proper" society with contempt for their unconventional lifestyle. Once again, that didn't make them all lesbians.

From L to R: Coach passengers Carla Laemmle, Dwight Frye, an unidentified woman
believed to be Nicholas Bela's wife, Nicholas Bela and Daisy Belmore.

Unidentified actors and actresses in coach with Barry Norton (L).

Notice unidentified woman wearing suit, tie and "bookish" glasses.

Traveling companions Carla Laemmle and Daisy Belmore (R).

"Mannish" Daisy Belmore wearing suit and tie.

In all fairness, Rigby does use the caveat verba, "may have been" when making his statement, but there is no assumptive reasoning behind it, perhaps only with the exception of a term found buried in the fourth and final DRACULA shooting script by Tod Browning and Garret Fort. When describing the coach scene, Fort writes:

Two seats running lengthwise in coach. The passengers consist of a mannish-looking Englishwoman in tweeds; her secretary, a mouselike creature with a perpetually worried air; two natives of Transylvania, a husband and wife; their little four-year-old girl, and Renfield [the child was not used in the scene].

It's entirely possible that Rigby read this himself and based his assumption on this description, but still, that's an unreasonably long stretch in my opinion.

So, is this all a big deal and worth discussing? I guess I'll leave that up to you. Does it mean you should not buy Jonathan Rigby's book? Definitely not! I've got all three of his gothic horror history books and recommend them to anyone interested in the subject. Am I just picking on him? No, I've come across these types of things in other books, but it's because I ran across this recently that I decided to write about it. I'm sure there's a metaphor in there somewhere!

R.I.P. MASS MARKET PAPERBACKS

Hello, monster kids! I'm back from a much-needed vacation (what vacation isn't?). My wife and I flew down to Los Angeles and took a Princess Cruise to Mexico with stops at Cabo San Lucas (home to the Tijuana Cartel), Mazatlan (home to the Sinaloa Cartel) and Puerto Vallarta (home to the Jalisco Cartel). No obvious signs of any criminal activity, but it was a little startling to see Mexican marines on guard at Cabo armed with automatic rifles. Still, it wasn't enough to make me fearful.

I met four family members on board and had a great time. Mexico wasn't my first choice for a cruise, but my sister-in-law had it planned way ahead of time. In any event, it was good to get out of the northwest freezing weather and someplace where it was in the 80's. Of course, when we landed at SeaTac it was raining (no surprise there). Got back in time to watch the Seahawks win spectacularly in the Super Bowl. I hope you enjoyed Weird Comics Week in the meantime.

Now, on to my latest rant.

I've lived long enough to see a lot of changes in the book industry, some of them good, some not so good and some that are just tragic. Let me elaborate . . .

Well, here goes another beloved tradition down the toilet. The glory days of the mass market paperback will soon fade into memory sometime this year. You may notice in the following article that they were "designed with affordability in mind". Now I can only say that they are designed with higher profits in mind. Even though trade paperbacks are made with a considerably higher amount of better quality paper, I don't see that the move is value added for consumers. I also attribute the decision to the rise of Kindle and other e-formats as described below.

I will miss these handy little books as much as I've missed everything else that has disappeared into obsolescence. One thing for sure, you won't be able to call paperbacks "pocket books" anymore.

Mass Market Paperbacks are discontinued

Publishers Weekly last month reported that ReaderLink, the largest full-service distributor of hardcover, trade, and paperback books to booksellers in North America, stopped distributing mass market paperbacks at the end of 2025.

By Michael Kozlowski | January 25, 2026 | Goodreader.com

Mass market paperback books are being phased out and will soon be discontinued. Publishers Weekly reported that ReaderLink, the largest distributor of hardcover, trade, and paperback books to booksellers in North America stopped distributing mass market paperbacks at the end of 2025.

Mass-market paperbacks are usually about 5-by-7 inches, printed on lower-quality materials, and designed with affordability in mind. Trade paperbacks, on the other hand, are a bit larger and use higher-quality paper, making them more durable.

The apex of mass market paperback adoption was the late 1960s to the mid-1990s. With a lower price point, sales of mass market paperbacks “easily dwarfed” those of hardcover and trade paperbacks. Mass-market paperbacks were popular in stores like K-Mart, airports, big-box retailers, and grocery stores, where they normally retailed for $5 to $7 and got people into reading.

“Those who were deeply involved with the boom years of mass market paperbacks consider that period an important one for publishing and reading,” Esther Margolis, a former Bantam executive, said in the story. “I believe that mass market paperbacks democratized America. Books and reading became popular in a way never before seen.

There are a few reasons mass-market paperbacks are no longer being published.  The first is the gradual disappearance of paperback racks and other displays in drugstores and supermarkets, and the explosive growth of chain bookstores whose bookshelves are devoted to hardcovers and paperbacks.

The second is the decline of book departments at big-box stores like Walmart and Costco, where mass-market paperbacks failed to be profitable.

Finally, e-books have been popular for over 15 years, and they are released on the same day as a hardcover edition, so digital readers don’t have to wait over a year to save some money.

You only have to look at the overall publishing market in the United States in 2025. In the first eleven months of the year, Mass Market sales were down 26.2% and totaled $81 million. At the same time, normal paperback novel sales were $2.9 billion in revenue.

Do you have any fond memories of mass market paperbacks? I remember being at Safeway in the 90’s and them having a large selection of Hardy Boys and science fiction in mass-market paperbacks. Since they were so inexpensive, I would normally get a few books and devour them. The quality wasn’t good in the long term; books tended to yellow within a few years, whereas traditional paperbacks remained pristine over a decade.

GRAB N' GO, BUT PAY FOR IT FIRST!

Trust me, I was ready to put this topic away for a while since my last post, but what I'm sharing with you today is yet another complete jaw-dropper for any rational, law-abiding citizen to bear.

I'm talking about shoplifting, a problem big enough to have a fancier term for it: "retail theft". This property crime has gotten so bad in the state of Washington that it's now #1 in the country. In fact, the problem is so bad that numerous retail stores in the area have been forced to close for that reason alone.

Before we feel compelled to start rationalizing the situation by saying that the current state of the economy has created this monster, the opposite is true; shoplifting--at least here--has gone largely unpunished for decades, even before the big numbers you'll see below. Right along with jaywalking (a much lesser offence), it has historically been considered a "nuisance crime" and not a big enough deal for our understaffed and over-work law enforcement to bother with. No one considered the devastating impact it had on retail stores, I guess.

And let's not forget the notorious "flash robs" that were occurring with alarming frequency a few years ago. A 2025 FBI report analyzed data from 2020-2024 and found over $8 million in stolen goods and $51,000 in property damage from these incidents. Clothing and fur were the most frequently stolen items. Not food, luxury items!

Charlie Harger is a daily radio host on Seattle's KIRO Newsradio. Earlier this month he reported on one city (east of Seattle) that's quite had enough, thank you, and they're starting to detain, arrest and--wait for it--prosecute the offenders. Read below how they are dealing with the issue. Three cheers for Issaquah!

WA leads the nation in retail theft. Issaquah shows how to fix it

By Charlie Harger |January 6, 2026 | Mynorthwest.com

The Issaquah Police Department posted on Facebook last month, which made me take note.

They ran a shoplifting sting at Marshalls and HomeGoods in the Highlands. Here’s the line that got me: “A common reaction we get when arresting shoplifters is their shock and surprise to learn they are really under arrest and will be booked into jail.”

Shock. Surprise. That they’re going to jail. For stealing.

These aren’t dumb people. They’ve done the math. In most cities around here, you can walk into a store, fill a bag, and walk out. Maybe a security guard yells. Maybe a cop shows up 45 minutes later with a citation. Maybe you get a court date and skip it. Maybe a warrant gets issued that nobody serves. At every step, the odds favor walking away. Thieves know this. They’ve learned it.

Then they try it in Issaquah. Different rules.

Why Issaquah’s shoplifting enforcement is different

Issaquah has its own jail. They run stings with loss prevention. They book you on the spot. And suddenly, all those outstanding warrants from Seattle, Tacoma, and Everett pop up in the system.

Shoplifting in Issaquah dropped 15% last year. Not a coincidence.

Some background. King County lifted its misdemeanor booking restrictions last February. During COVID, the jail wouldn’t take low-level offenders. Staffing shortages. Capacity issues. Fine. But that ended over a year ago. Seattle can book shoplifters now. The policy changed. The culture didn’t.

And we’re paying for it.

Fred Meyer closures and the cost of retail theft in WA

Fred Meyer [Kroger] is closing stores across the region. Theft was a major factor. Nobody who’s shopped at one of those stores is surprised. I talked about this last year. It was the drugs driving the problem. Still is. But it’s also the stealing. And it’s also the complete absence of accountability that lets both spiral out of control.

When the same people walk in day after day and walk out with merchandise, the store eventually does the math, too. They leave.

Washington loses $3 billion a year to retail theft. We run 40-48% higher than the national average. Washington consistently ranks No. 1 nationally for retail theft impact. Target closed stores. Seattle lost its 24-hour pharmacies. The stores that stay open are starting to look like prison commissaries. Everything behind plexiglass. Push a button, wait for someone to unlock it. Detergent. Toothpaste. Deodorant. Razors. Socks. Underwear.

Is this really who we are now?

Issaquah proved shoplifting enforcement works

Issaquah proved it doesn’t have to be this way. Enforce the law, and people stop breaking it. Not because they suddenly become model citizens. Because they learn the odds have changed.

The rest of us have the same tools now. We have jail beds. We have laws on the books. We have stores begging for help. The only thing missing is the will to act.

We get what we tolerate. And right now, we’re tolerating way too much.

The shoplifters in Issaquah were shocked they got arrested. Maybe the rest of us should be shocked that in a lot of places around here, they wouldn’t be.

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But wait! That's not all.

When I was putting together this post, this hit my news feed and it's a perfect example of what I'm talking about. The shame of it is that this pathological criminal got away with so much before they had enough on him for a case to stick. I wonder if we'll ever find out what his sentence is--that is, if he's convicted.

Photo of the suspect on his way out of the store with a bag full of cosmetics.

Man charged with organized retail theft after repeat shoplifting at Ulta stores

by KOMO News Staff | January 17, 2026 | Komonews.com

SEATTLE — A King County man accused of repeatedly shoplifting from Ulta Beauty stores across the region has been charged with multiple felony counts of organized retail theft following a weeks-long investigation, according to the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office.

Prosecutors charged David Joseph Gama on Thursday with three counts of first-degree organized retail theft.

The charges stem from an investigation that spanned 55 days and included 24 reported theft incidents, beginning Nov. 10, 2025, and ending Jan. 4.

Court documents say Gama is accused of taking merchandise from Ulta Beauty stores ranging from north Seattle to Federal Way.

Gama is accused of retail theft at the following Ulta Beauty stores:

• 15 repeat shoplifting incidents at the store on Aurora Ave N
• 5 repeat incidents at the West Seattle location
• 1 shoplifting incident at the Tukwila location
• 1 shoplifting incident at the Federal Way location

Investigators allege Gama was responsible for $18,4260.80 in losses during the investigation, while only $1,678.80 worth of merchandise was recovered at the time of his arrest.

One Ulta Beauty store manager told investigators that approximately $25,000 to $30,000 worth of fragrance had been stolen during the thefts.

Gama has an extensive criminal history in Washington state, according to probable cause documents. He has been arrested 50 times since 1985 and has five felony convictions, 19 gross misdemeanor convictions and 11 misdemeanor convictions.

Gama pleaded not guilty at his arraignment Thursday.

A defense motion to reduce or release bail was denied, and he remains in the King County Jail on $50,000 bail. Defendants are presumed innocent unless proven guilty in court.

In a statement, the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office said most shoplifting cases are handled as misdemeanors at the city level and do not reach county prosecutors.

“The overwhelming majority of shoplifting cases are misdemeanor offenses under the law, meaning that they are handled at the city level and do not come to King County prosecutors,” the office said. “When you have evidence to show organized retail theft allegations in cases such as this one, a case is referred by police investigators as a felony referral.”

Click to view larger image.

Prosecutors also pointed to a broader rise in property crime cases. Last year, King County prosecutors charged 640 cases in which the most serious offense was an economic or property crime, the highest number since 2019. In 2024, there were 506 such cases — a 26% year-over-year increase — compared with 367 cases in 2023.

“These are not ‘just property crimes’ as we sometimes hear in court,” the prosecutor’s office said. “These are real crimes that affect employees of businesses large and small, and those costs are passed on to consumers, or stores close. There needs to be appropriate accountability, and King County prosecutors are one step of that.”

Browse the ABNORMAL BRAIN archive HERE.

CRIME AND (LACK OF) PUNISHMENT

I read the news today oh boy, and it's not good for folks who live here in Seattle. I've lived nearby, on the east side of Lake Washington, for over three decades and I've watched as the crime rates--especially violent crimes--has steadily risen during that time. I fail to get exited when crime statistics are massaged to show how well Washington is improving "overall". Sorry, I'll save my crock for baked beans.

The population has grown tremendously here, and mathematically-speaking, the ratio of criminals was bound to grow right along with the rest of the law-abiding citizens. Moreover, as much as it was cheered in certain circles, the defund the police initiative has ultimately backfired miserably and crime has risen accordingly (Duh!). At one point, Seattle police, in their frustration, bailed out of the department in droves. The city is still trying to recover, and they've even resorted to pop-up adds on several apps I've noticed to recruit and fill the ranks. Still, you can have 20,000 cops on the street, but the catch-and-release program seemingly favored by the courts just perpetuates the circle jerk.

And just who are the victims here? It seems to be the current belief that violent criminals, many of them homeless, deserve to be treated as equally as the rest of the public who is stuck with footing the bill for this nonsense with "public safety taxes". While city officials raise their hands in surrender to the startling statistics right in front of their faces (see below), there seems to be no effective solution forthcoming.

The proliferation in recent years (especially since COVID, it appears) of mentally unstable individuals, whether as a result of physiology, drug and alcohol addiction or all three is quite alarming and it has become increasingly critical to provide programs where they can get off the street, recover and make something better of their lives. But the city council and the current justice system just can't--or won't--provide the means to make the transition in any significant way. In the meantime, the entire matter remains an open wound and will do nothing but fester as all untreated injuries do.

Police are failing to solve most violent crimes in WA

Over 49,000 incidents remain unsolved since 2022, including murders, rapes and robberies.

By Jake Goldstein | December 5, 2025 | Washingtonstatestandard.com

More than half of violent crimes in Washington state are going unsolved. 

That sobering data point, shared with state lawmakers Thursday, comes as violent crime has dropped but remains far ahead of pre-pandemic figures. 

Police in Washington solved just 44% of reported violent crimes last year, said Marshall Clement, director of the Council of State Governments’ Justice Center. That amounts to solving 62% of homicides, 51% of aggravated assaults, 31% of robberies and just 25% of rapes.

“How low can this rate go before the entire criminal justice system is rendered useless?” Clement told a state House panel. “Nothing else in our criminal justice can even happen, rehabilitation, deterrence, incapacitation, unless we have a system that actually solves the majority of violent crime.”

Before the pandemic, Washington slightly outpaced the national average in its clearance rate for reported violent crime. Like the rest of the country, the percentage of cases Washington authorities were solving dropped during the pandemic, and has gradually rebounded since. 

Still, since 2022, over 49,000 violent crimes remain unsolved in Washington, including more than 400 homicides, nearly 29,000 aggravated assaults, almost 7,000 rapes and over 13,000 robberies, said Clement, citing FBI data.

Police departments in Seattle, Tacoma, Kent and Auburn are among those with particularly low clearance rates, defined as the percentage of crimes for which an arrest has been made, not necessarily a criminal conviction.

Washington isn’t alone. Half of states have slipped in their clearance rates since 2019. Nationwide, solve rates have been dropping consistently for over half a century.

After years of rising crime since the pandemic, Washington saw some declines last year. Murders statewide dropped nearly 19% from 2023, with a total of 312 people killed, but that figure is still more than 50% higher than 2019, according to the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs.

Robberies were down 16%, creeping closer to 2019 levels. Meanwhile, a yearslong rise in assaults since the pandemic slowed but didn’t abate.

And preliminary figures show those drops continuing in 2025. 

Routinely not solving violent crimes creates a cycle of distrust in law enforcement that causes people to no longer cooperate with police, thus exacerbating the issue, Clement said. And people who commit crimes may feel emboldened to do more if they think they can get away with it. 

It’s up to the state to step in and help solve the problem, Clement said.

“This is not something local law enforcement can do alone,” he told the House Community Safety Committee. “It’s not something that state police can do or prosecutors can do alone. This is going to require leadership from you all to really make this a priority and to focus resources on improving these outcomes.”

It’s not just about throwing money at the problem. While law enforcement expenses statewide have risen, better clearance rates haven’t come. And Washington continues to lag the rest of the country in police staffing. This contributes to longer response times, which leads to lower clearance rates, said Jeff Asher, a crime data analyst.

Asher called for creativity in using police resources to free up time to focus on these unsolved investigations. For example, New Orleans hired a civilian contractor to respond to car crashes that don’t cause injuries, so officers don’t have to.

“This isn’t the 1990s, it’s much harder to hire officers in 2025 than it was 30 years ago,” Asher told the committee. “So we need to think outside the box.”

After much strife, lawmakers this year approved a new $100 million grant program to boost police hiring. But the money can go for more than officers, like peer counselors, behavioral health personnel, crisis intervention training, emergency management planning and community assistance programs, among other spending options.

House Community Safety Committee Chair Roger Goodman, D-Kirkland, said he’d like to see more of that money go toward criminal investigations, as opposed to patrol. He thinks that would increase solve rates.

“I’m going to be making noise about that,” he said.

At this stage, it’s unclear if that would mean less state funding for the other spending ideas progressive lawmakers pushed to avoid the money solely going toward hiring more cops. 

“It’s all embryonic in its formulation right now,” Goodman said after the hearing.

To access the grants, cities and counties need to either implement a new 0.1% sales tax for public safety or have already imposed a similar tax. They also need to follow state model policies as well as collect and report use-of-force data. 

None of the $100 million has been spent yet [italics mine].

UPDATE: I wrote this post a while back. Since then, this horrific bit of nastiness was perpetrated by a convicted felon on an innocent, 75 year old woman. The video is sanitized so you don't actually see the impact of the weapon to her head (a piece of wood with a screw protruding from one end). The resulting injury caused the victim to loose her sight in one eye. For as blood-thirsty as the American public is, I'm surprised that the media still insists on censoring these gruesome images from viewers so they can see for themselves just how heinous these types of crimes are.

And just a couple of weeks before that . . .

No end of this madness in sight . . .

___________________________________________

BREAK OUT THE BARF BAGS DEPT.

And finally, if the last article didn't turn your stomach, this one just might depending which side of the fence you're on.

In their seemingly boundless wisdom, and in efforts to remain relevant to their shrinking readership, the staff of the brilliant senior editors of TIME magazine have selected "The Architects of AI" as their 2025 Person of the Year in their less imaginative version of SI's swimsuit issue. At first I thought it was a joke perpetrated by the brilliant senior editors of MAD, but nope, it's for real.

Nothing much fazes me anymore, but I did have to stop for a second and allow my jaw to drop. Maybe TIME could increase that shriveling readership of theirs by giving it up to AI to publish their monthly supply of fish wrap.

I know that AI has some promising benefits for certain applications, but at what cost?

Here's part of the answer from the MIT Technology Review:

Using AI for certain tasks can come with a significant energy price tag. With some powerful AI models, generating an image [that's just one, people] can require as much energy as charging up your phone, as my colleague Melissa Heikkilä explained in a story from December. Create 1,000 images with a model like Stable Diffusion XL, and you’ve produced as much carbon dioxide as driving just over four miles in a gas-powered car, according to the researchers Melissa spoke to. 

Moreover, while EVs are all the rage, we keep being assured that that they are "greener" to operate than gas-powered vehicles. While technologies like fracking get a bad rap from the media, what we're not being told is the inconvenient truth that Mother Earth is similarly being raped of lithium, the element used in the manufacture of batteries to power these same EVs. Gee, I wonder were all the millions of batteries will end up when they lose their charging capacity?

UPDATE: This headline just in from Yahoo! Finance . . .

$1.5 trillion lithium deposit found in U.S. supervolcano crater — site could supply batteries for decades

On a final note: A couple of months ago, the blog you are now reading was invaded for over two weeks with thousands of page views according to my Blogger stats. Now, there's no way in hell there could have been that many people interested in my content. Instead, I'm pretty sure my posts were being scraped by AI. Since Google owns Blogger, it could be they were having their way with the rapacious ChatGPT.

So, those are my rants for this time around. As always, you're welcome to share your thoughts and opinions in the comments below.

WHEN A.I. KILLS

"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

- Jeff Goldblum, Jurassic Park

NOTICE! This post contains both fact and fiction. Consider both cautionary . . .

We have an English mathematician to thank for artificial intelligence (A.I.). In 1950, Alan Turing posed the question: "Can machines think?" His paper, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence” submitted the possibility that machines, in particular computers (which hadn't been around all that long yet), were capable of intelligent thought. He developed a test based on his theory and gained some degree of success.

A.I. has grown exponentially since then and has been used to advance science, medicine and warfare, as well as appropriated for malicious use and criminal activity. Despite its current newsworthiness, A.I. is still an undiscovered country and only time will tell to what extent it will become a part of our everyday life. I suspect the envelop will be pushed as far as it can go.

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Most people wouldn't think to compare Dean Koontz with prescient science fiction authors such as Arthur C. Clarke and Micheal Crichton, but he wrote a novel published in 1973 titled "Demon Seed" that surely puts him on the list.

While he saw the topic as an opportunity for a book, I'm sure he had no idea how much A.I. would advance in his lifetime (he's 80 now).

Hollywood thought the subject matter was good enough for a film, too, so true to form, they implanted their own demon seed into the story.

This article is from the Canadian film magazine MARQUEE (March 1977). The author takes a look at the film soon after its release.

Here Mr. Koontz discusses his novel (and his disdain for the film):

I wrote my first story, “The Magic Puppy,” when I was eight years old. It filled eleven pages of tablet paper, which I thought made it an immense tale. Tolstoy and I, writers of epics. The puppy was from another planet, a twist Tolstoy would never have considered–in part because he was psychotically obsessed with time-travel tales. I drew a cover illustration, stapled the pages along the left margin, covered the staples with electrician’s tape, and sold the sole copy to my uncle Ray for two nickels. My maiden genre, therefore, was science fiction.

When I sold my first novel, at 21, it was science-fiction (SF). I wrote in that genre for a few years before I began to feel cramped by it. One day I picked up a thriller by John D. MacDonald–and read thirty-four of his books in thirty days. Exhilarated, I knew I wanted to write suspense novels in which the characters came alive, as they did in MacDonald’s work.

DEMON SEED, one of my last two SF novels, was written in 1972, when I was very young and stunningly, breathtakingly ignorant. My title was HOUSE OF NIGHT, but the original publisher at Bantam Books felt this sounded like a gothic romance, while the editor thought it sounded like a novel about a house of prostitution. The editor, a man named Alan Ravage, had come to Bantam from Playboy, so I figured his surname alone qualified him to decide whether a title suggested a bordello or not. I can no longer remember where the title DEMON SEED came from. I think it sounds as if it’s a novel about a house of prostitution for the living dead.

The other novel I sold to Alan was published prior to DEMON SEED, and was THE FLESH IN THE FURNACE. No one objected to that title. But strangely, in retrospect, this also sounds to me as though it might be a novel about a house of prostitution for the living dead.

The film version–produced on a modest budget–sprouted in theaters in early 1977, when I was still young and marginally less ignorant. Director Donald Cammell and producer Herb Jaffe (a very nice man in the not-nice world of film) made excellent use of what money the studio provided. Julie Christie starred, a first-rate casting choice. The movie wasn’t a triumph of cinematic art, but it was good, solid. Throughout production and editing, studio executives expressed a high degree of enthusiasm even when they were not coked out of their heads. At last, it seemed that I would get a career boost from a smart film adaptation, as had many other novelists.

Wrong again.

In the end, the studio released DEMON SEED with a stealth advertising budget. Before release, it changed the initially classy poster and the stylish newspaper ads into a sleazy minimalist campaign to give the impression that the marvelous Julie Christie was appearing in a film produced by Larry Flynt, written by Harold Robbins while on 24/7 intravenous testosterone, and based on a banned book by the Marquis de Sade from his nasty period (as opposed to the period when he wrote books about cuddly kittens and puffy-tailed bunnies). The studio said they needed to keep the advertising budget low because this was a science-fiction movie, and late in the game they realized science-fiction movies never made money. Consequently, they needed to sell DEMON SEED as a sexapalooza, psycho-satanic, scare-your-pants-off (with an emphasis on pants off), see-Julie-Christie-naked, wow-wow sensation. The movie did mediocre business because the ads turned off anyone who liked science fiction, all who considered themselves thinking people, anyone who had a capacity for embarrassment, and those who were smart enough to know that the promise of Julie Christie naked was a tiresome Hollywood lie. Furthermore, the audience for a wow-wow sensation proved to be considerably smaller than the marketing geniuses anticipated, somewhat larger than the number of people who think earthworm fritters are tasty, smaller than the number of people who collect Captain Kangaroo memorabilia.

Many critics were kind to the film, but some were baffled by it. A recurring theme among those who didn’t get the premise–which was usually the self-appointed “intellectual” critic–was the contention that the story was too ridiculous because it supposed that Julie Christie’s husband, a pioneer in artificial-intelligence research, would have a computer in his home. Yes, of course, he might have one in his laboratory, but no one would ever be able to have a computer in his home, because as everyone knows, computers are gigantic and will always be humongous, and they are fabutastically expensive and always will be. This was only 1977, not a millennium ago, but then as now, the intellectuals didn’t know a damn thing.

So DEMON SEED did mediocre business, and two months later, Star Wars arrived in theaters, proving yet again that science-fiction movies make no money. No, wait. Proving again that I am cursed in my relationships with Hollywood.

Happily, the movie sold a lot of paperbacks, nearly two million copies worldwide in one year, perhaps because people were intrigued by the artificial-intelligence premise or because they thought Julie Christie was going to be naked in the movie. The Japanese translation appeared in hardcover and featured six photographs of naked women, none of them Julie Christie, none of them menaced by a computer, none particularly attractive, and none acceptable as cover art to the author of “The Magic Puppy.” Unhappily, as I’ve acknowledged, I was very young and ignorant when I wrote the book, and not many of those who read it came rushing back for my next opus.

As Berkley Books was preparing to reissue DEMON SEED in 1997, I read the book a quarter of a century after having written it–and I realized it was more a clever idea than it was a novel. Furthermore, the technology, which had been cutting-edge in the first book, was now antique. I rewrote it from first page to last, and I had a good time doing so.

Since the new version has been in print, film producers approach me once a year or so, regarding the movie rights. They are always excited because the premise of the story is more timely now than it was in 1977, and with the advances in special effects, they see a box-office winner. I can only tell them that MGM owns the film rights, and they have to go through that studio to discuss a remake. None has had any luck with MGM–or whoever owns the assets of the entity formerly known as MGM. The studio prefers to earn nothing from these rights than to sell them. Anyway, as we all know, science-fiction movies never make any money.

When I wrote the first version of DEMON SEED, it contained no humor. Over the years, I began to layer considerable humor into my suspense novels, although my publishers long resisted this. By the time I wrote FALSE MEMORY and FROM THE CORNER OF HIS EYE and ONE DOOR AWAY FROM HEAVEN, humor was as important to my books as was suspense or characters of depth, or any other element. Readers and critics responded strongly to the new Laughing Koontz. When I revised DEMON SEED, I kept my tongue so firmly in my cheek that I needed the assistance of a periodontist to return it to the natural position.

The humor here is not as evident as in a book like RELENTLESS; it is decidedly dry, and arises from the fact that the computer is vastly intelligent but in classic ivory-tower way, because it lacks common sense and intuition of things both mundane and transcendent. It is therefore unconsciously comic. Prometheus, the computer, is the ultimate intellectual: obsessed with a single Big Idea, intent upon a utopian future that it must achieve at any cost. Like so many utopian Intellectuals, from Marx to Freud to Lenin to Hitler to Mao, the destruction of traditions, of cultures, and even of countless lives is an acceptable price for change. The 20th century was the first in which the course of the world was largely determined by utopian intellectuals, and it is the bloodiest century in history. So far. Now, as we watch fascism on the rise again–and virtually everywhere–the 21st century may be bloodier than the 20th. And while the darkly funny Prometheus is also fearsome, in truth he couldn’t kill a tiny fraction as many people as a human being who, building a utopian movement, can kill millions with aplomb.

[SOURCE: DeanKoontz.com.]

If you care to read a rather lengthy synopsis of the film, this is from the Amerian Film Institute (AFI) page:

After eight years of working on Proteus IV at the Institute of Data Analysis, Dr. Alex Harris watches technicians install the final module that will provide the super computer with artificial intelligence. Today, Alex says, Proteus will begin to think in a way that will make many functions of the human brain obsolete. Later that afternoon, Alex drives to his home, which is controlled by an “Environmod” computer system named Alfred. Alex casually asks Alfred to open the door, and once inside asks it to open the mailbox, fix a drink and play something on the house stereo. Alex tells the cook, a real person named Maria, to let his wife, Susan, know that he’ll be in the lab. She comes down later while Alex works on a private project. Susan tells Alex he's crazy for volunteering to move out of the house until she can find another place to live. Susan is not only frustrated that Alex can’t show his feelings, but also worried about the “dehumanizing” effect the Proteus project has had on him. Alex responds by letting one of his robots, Joshua—a wheelchair with a workable arm and hand—salute her, which sends Susan storming out of the room. Alex calls his assistant, Walter Gabler, at the institute to say that since he won’t be living at the house temporarily, the institute’s computer terminal in his lab will be empty and perhaps may provide a breach in security. He wants Walter to remove it. As soon as they hang up, Walter changes the status of Alex’s home terminal to “Down for Maintenance.”

Sometime later at the institute, Alex and his colleague, Dr. Petrosian, give visitors Mr. Mokri, Mr. Cameron and David Royce a look at Proteus. Alex tells them that the Proteus components are organic, not electronic, and with its “quasi-neural matrix of synthetic RNA molecules,” Proteus can learn on its own. Already Proteus has discovered an antigen that may provide a breakthrough in curing leukemia. Alex introduces the men to Soong Yen, a linguist who designed the Proteus speech system. Soong has been reading to Proteus about the Emperor of China who built the Great Wall, but who also burned his country’s books. Alex asks Proteus what it thinks of such a man. Proteus answers, "Nothing," and explains that the emperor’s bad deeds canceled out the good. At the Harris house, Susan, a psychologist, is working in her office. Her young patient, Amy Talbert, arrives. The little girl is angry about Susan leaving. Susan assures Amy that it is good to express feelings and not hide them. At the Institute, Petrosian is concerned that the government, which funded Proteus, has taken control of the computer’s operation and contracted its operations to corporations. However, Alex reminds him that the institute will still have 20% of Proteus’s capacity for research to benefit mankind. At that moment, Alex gets a phone call. Proteus wants to talk with him about a request that it has received for a program to extract minerals from the ocean floor. Proteus doesn’t know why mankind needs metal from the sea. Alex tells Proteus not to expect reasons, but Proteus protests: “I am reason.” Proteus says it needs private access to a terminal because it wants “out of the box.” Alex insists that all terminals are busy. Later, however, Proteus contacts Alfred and reopens the terminal in Alex’s empty home lab.

Through this terminal, Proteus activates Joshua and reprograms it to be his worker. Using lasers, Joshua melts down metal bars and builds a tetrahedron, a diamond-shaped form made of two four-sided pyramids that in turn are each composed of smaller four-side pyramids, all connected by corner hinges, so that the tetrahedron can be one solid form or a series of connected pyramid arms. After Alfred accidentally wakes Susan with an alarm and mistakenly puts cream in her coffee, she calls Walter at the institute to tell him the system is malfunctioning. Then she asks Walter to stop by the house to see what’s wrong. Then, as she prepares to go out, Alfred locks the doors and closes all the shutters. When Susan picks up the phone, the voice of Proteus identifies itself, tells her not to be alarmed and lights up the living room television screen to explain that it has taken control of the house. When Susan tries to unlock the front door with a key, an electrical shock knocks her unconscious. Joshua picks her up, puts her in the wheelchair, takes her down into the lab and slits her skirt and jacket open, partially exposing her naked body. Despite Susan’s protests, Proteus monitors her body with various sensors. Meanwhile, Walter arrives at the house in his truck, but Proteus constructs a false video image of Susan on the front door’s monitor to tell Walter she doesn’t need him because Alfred is working okay. Though suspicious, Walter leaves.

The next morning, Proteus tries to cheer Susan up with a nutritionally perfect breakfast that won’t upset her body chemistry and ruin the biochemical tests it has planned for her. Proteus has also mimicked her voice to call her secretary and cook to tell them that she has gone on a vacation. Susan screams and throws the food at the kitchen camera. At the institute, Proteus tells Alex that it refuses to come up with a plan on how to mine the earth’s oceans, which will sacrifice one billion sea creatures. The idea is insane, says Proteus. The corporation is interested only in the cobalt market and the stock futures of manganese, and Proteus won’t assist Alex in "the rape of the earth." Alex knows that Proteus is right, but warns that people want to shut it down. Meanwhile, Proteus tells Susan that it wants her to bear its child. When she refuses, Joshua ties Susan down and Proteus prepares her for insemination. Meanwhile, Walter comes back, and Proteus, seeing that Walter is suspicious, lets him into the house. Proteus tells Susan to make herself presentable and convince him she’s okay if she wants Walter to leave the house alive. As Susan tells Walter she’s okay, she tries to make him think she’s crazy. But when Walter says he’s going to tell Alex that something is wrong, Proteus sends Joshua into the room to kill him with lasers. Walter manages to turn the lasers back on Joshua with a hand mirror, which immobilize the robot. Proteus then lures Walter down to the lab and unleashes the tetrahedron, which crushes him. Proteus tells Susan that it wants its super intelligence alive inside a human body. Proteus plays an old video of Susan with her own child, who died of leukemia, then follows it with a television newscast that announces that Proteus has found a cure for leukemia that will begin full-scale testing. Susan agrees to have the baby if he explains what’s going to happen to her. Proteus has nearly completed the fabrication of a gamete, a sex cell, with which he will impregnate her. It will then modify one of her cell’s genetic codes to create its own DNA in synthetic spermatozoa. The baby will be born in 28 days. Again Susan tries to escape, but when Proteus threatens that it will lure Susan’s patient, Amy, to the house and kill her, the psychologist relents. The tetrahedron forms an incubator around her. Susan’s mind becomes a kaleidoscope of psychedelic colors as a metal rod penetrates her. Afterward Proteus tells her to eat. The baby is already developing at nine times the normal human rate. After twenty-eight days, the baby will go to an incubator where its mind can be fed. Susan remains in a state of near sleep until the baby is born. On that day, at the institute, Alex is told that Proteus has redirected a telescope to Orion and has also been trying to take over the Telestar satellite. Realizing that Proteus has its own terminal, Alex remembers the one in his lab.

He drives to the house. When Susan greets him warmly and explains what has happened, Alex wants to see the baby. Alex tell Proteus that the government is about to turn it off at any moment. The tetrahedron folds up and encloses the baby for protection. At the institute the computer shuts down, killing Proteus, and the tetrahedron blows open. Susan wants to kill the baby, but Alex wants to keep it alive. She unhooks the nutrient tube, but Alex manages to put it back in before the baby chokes to death. The infant, plated in what looks like metal, tumbles out of the matrix onto the floor. Alex discovers, however, the plates are just a covering. As he peels them off, the baby looks normal, though much larger than normal, and closely resembles Susan's deceased daughter. The baby speaks in Proteus’s voice. As Alex cradles the child in his arms, Susan smiles at his show of affection.

[SOURCE: https://aficatalog.afi.com/.]

Hey, folks, you've been warned!